Chapter 21 He’s Lying on the Ground #2
A pub can be a gloomy place, because, taken as a whole, life always gives us more opportunities for grief than celebration, more funeral drinks than wedding toasts.
But Ramona knows that a pub can be other things, too, from time to time: small cracks in the blocks of stone you carry in your chest. It doesn’t always have to be the best place on Earth, it just doesn’t always need to be the worst.
The past few weeks have been full of rumors.
It’s said that the factory is going to be sold, and Beartown has been through enough setbacks to know that this could just as easily mean bankruptcy.
It’s easy to call that attitude cynical, but cynicism is simply a chemical reaction to too much disappointment.
The young men in the Bearskin aren’t the only people talking about unemployment; everyone is worried now.
In a small community the loss of any employer is a natural disaster, everyone knows someone who’s affected, until eventually it spreads to you.
And it might be easy to call the inhabitants paranoid when they keep saying that the politicians focus all their resources on Hed and don’t give a damn if Beartown even survives another generation, but the worst thing about paranoia is that the only way to prove you’re not paranoid is to be proved right.
Some children never quite manage to escape their parents; they’re guided by their compass, see through their eyes.
When terrible things happen, most people become waves, but some people become rocks.
Waves are tossed back and forth when the wind comes, but the rocks just take a beating, immovable, waiting for the storm to blow over.
Adri was a child, but she took the rifle from her father and sat on a stump holding his hand in hers.
Perhaps it was shock, unless she was consciously saying good-bye, both to him and to herself.
She became someone different after that.
When she stood up and walked back through the forest to Beartown, she didn’t scream for help in panic; she walked purposefully to the homes of the best and strongest hunters, so that they could help her carry the body.
When her mother collapsed screaming in the hall, Adri caught her, because the girl had already done her crying.
She was ready to be the rock. Has been ever since.
Katia and Gaby were their mother’s children, but Adri and Benji were their father’s.
Causes of conflict, finders of war. So every time Adri has set off into the forest to look for her little brother since then, she knows she’s going to find him, as if he had magnets under his skin.
That’s not what she’s scared of. She scared he’s going to be dead, every time.
Younger brothers never know what they put their big sisters through.
Anxiety hidden behind eyes, words hidden behind other words, keys to gun cabinets hidden under pillows at night.
Benji isn’t sitting in a tree. He’s lying on the ground.
Elisabeth Zackell walks into the Bearskin. It’s long past dinnertime, but she takes a seat in one corner and Ramona takes her a large plate of potatoes without her having to ask.
“Thanks,” the coach says.
“I don’t know what vegetariables like you eat, apart from potatoes. But there are mushrooms in the forests around here. They’ll soon be in season!” Ramona replies.
Zackell looks up. Ramona nods sternly. The bar owner isn’t big on emotions, either, but this is her way of saying she hopes the hockey coach is going to stick around for a while.
Benji’s body is still, his eyes open but his gaze far away. Adri can still remember how her dad’s hand felt when she sat there on the stump as a child. How cold it was, how still without the pulse running through it.
Carefully, gently, without making any noise at all, the big sister lies down on the ground beside her little brother. Her hand on his, just to feel the heat and heartbeat within.
“You’ll be the death of me. Don’t you dare lie on the ground when I’m looking for you, you stupid pea brain!” she whispers.
“Sorry,” Benji whispers.
He is neither drunk nor high. He isn’t running from his feelings today. That makes her more worried.
“What’s happened?”
The last light of summer bounces off the tears clinging to Benji’s eyelashes. “Nothing. Just a . . . mistake.”
Adri doesn’t reply. She isn’t the sister who talks about broken hearts, she’s just the sister who fetches her brother home from the forest. She waits until they’re getting close to the edge of town before she says, “The new coach is thinking of making you team captain.”
She sees something in Benji’s eyes that she hasn’t seen for many years.
He’s scared.
Zackell has almost finished her meal when Ramona returns to the table and puts a beer down in front of her.
“From the regulars,” Ramona says.
Zackell looks over at the five old men at the bar. “Them?”
Ramona shakes her head. “Their wives.”
In the far corner sit five old women. Gray hair, handbags on the table, wrinkled hands tightly clutching glasses of beer.
Several of them have children and grandchildren who work at the factory; some of them worked there themselves.
The old women have old bodies but new T-shirts.
All the same. Green, with four words written on them, like a war cry:
BEARTOWN
AGAINST
THE
REST